THE BORDER REPORT

Probably quit daily journalism in disgust; try to land a gig at a magazine or online news service and keep digging away at the stories nobody else in Arizona seems to care about anymore. But Bolles is dead now, the victim of a car-bombing 30 years ago, leaving the rest of us behind trying to catch up to his cooling legacy. It's not pretty. Fresh from an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Phoenix, my mind goes sour thinking of the sorry state of affairs of daily journalism in this country. There's a tendency to warn of the dangers of the cartels on the media in Mexico. The beatings, the silencing, the repression. In Mexico, the Sinaloans and the Cartel del Golfo beat reporters, threaten them, hound them, and otherwise do anything they can to control what they publish. But the same results happen here, not with PR-24s and beatings but with cutbacks, restrictions and the threat of loss of jobs by the media corporations. The scoundrels blame the Internet, sobbing over Craigslist and Google as if they alone are responsible for the loss of interest in paper product. Consider: Hearst Corporation is shutting down the Mexico City bureau of one of its Texas newspapers this summer. In Arizona, Freedom Communications darkened the border beat of one of its newspapers here. No sign when that position will return nor any mention of this vital beat's suspense. Gannett Comany, Inc., pulled back its border beat from Tucson to Phoenix as part of its redesign - as if the border could be effectively covered from three hours away. The attacks on Mexican journalists are important; I obsess with the topic every day. But a far more permanent decimation is occurring on the U.S. side. Perhaps it also bears covering. I don't think Bolles would be very happy.

-- Michael Marizco